This new book explains why ‘Punjabiyat’ or ‘Punjabiness’ is both emotionally and culturally complex
An excerpt from the Introduction to ‘Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab’, edited by Anshu Malhotra.
Everyone who lives in, thinks of, remembers, and writes about Punjab, imagines an entity that is particular to them. This is because the historical and territorial imaginary that is Punjab has been politically and spatially unstable and mutating; though from early times, the region’s identity has remarkably been cast around its rivers and doabs. Thus, from the two Punjab-s, Indian and Pakistani, post the brutal Partitioning of colonial Punjab in 1947; to the state re-structuring of 1966 after the demand for “Punjabi Suba”; to the imaginings of a “Sikh/Khalsa” homeland from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, often with the support of Sikhs from the global diaspora; or those for whom Partition meant the loss of a territory called homeland as for “Punjabi Hindus” of Delhi, or the “Hindu Punjabis” of the British diaspora; what Punjab means to whom may vary. In the same vein, what one holds dear about Punjab, the sense of belonging and the embracing of a “Punjabiness” or Punjabiyat, the ambiguous term imbricated in affect, and charged with emotional and cultural investment, is hailed variously by people. Territory, culture, language, religion, caste, or even a primordial affiliation beyond or a hybrid of these taxonomies, may be invoked to adumbrate...
